Rocket Comics #2 - pt. 3

We're still reading Steel Shark. It's a curious feature; I can't tell from this story if this is supposed to be some time in the future or if it's a more hi-tech version of 1940, so I had to go back and read the first issue's story and this is actually meant to be 1960. The widespread use of television is pretty accurate. But Flux-Ray guns that melt ships in minutes? That's a wrecking ray that didn't exist in 1960. 

Wrecking is so often instantaneous in the comics that it's interesting to read about a ray that takes over 1 exploration turn to wreck. 

"Gyro-pilot control" must mean autopilot, which is odd because autopilot had already been a thing since 1914.

Batteries seem to work different in this 1960; I can't guess how a lurch would foul the batteries. Batteries only "foul" like that when they've been overcharged, and even then the risk is more about an explosion than suffocation, because not that much hydrogen should be leaking.  

We know we're not in the kids adventure genre when Tommy is sent below deck. If this was Dickie Dare, that boy would be all up in the action! 

"Aqua-vapo"? You're trying awfully hard to sound scientific when you have to come up with a new word for water vapor. Water vapor - also known as fog -- doesn't seem like it would make for concealment as well as smoke would. I might treat fog as light cover.   

There are some puzzling aspects of this page and the next.

1. What is the area of effect of a depth charge? How much in danger was Jones' sub? 

2. Again, we are told the subs are very close together, so close that the Flux-ray-guns backfire and jolt Steel Shark just for holding the controls. How do they feedback only to the controls and not the whole sub? And why would flux rays bounce back? I suppose we need to understand what flux rays are first, and I doubt we're ever going to get that information.

Again, the science here is pretty sketchy, but we really can't say for sure that dry ice wouldn't counter a flux ray, since we still don't know what a flux ray is.  

More interesting is the fact that Steel Shark is able to observe Jones telling his crew how to counter the flux ray. Did Jones forget to turn off their closed circuit television connection? It reminds me of the beginning of this sketch, which I just happened to watch earlier today - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp_Fw5oDMao

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is the last page, which says "Harry 'A' Chesler Syndicate" at the bottom, proving this comic was produced by the Chesler Shop for Hillman (really, from its pedestrian-ness alone I would have suspected that from this title). Since there's nothing else on that page worth seeing, you're just gonna' have to take my word on this....   

We're going to jump into the next story now, which is Buzzard Barnes. There's little to see here, including the amount of cover necessary to hide behind for a successful hiding skill check. 

Past that...it's looking like this was a false lead. If Maynard was really up to something suspicious, he probably wouldn't get drunk right away, and he would try to flee rather than pick a fight. Let's see if I'm right...

Nope, I was wrong! So what was the point of the drunkenness? Was he feigning drunkenness to appear innocent, or is he just an alcoholic spy? Or is he a drunken hoodlum? That would be interesting - we haven't see one of those on the blog in a long time!  

You know, I'm also thinking how easy this scenario was: figure out who the spy is, from a list of one suspect.

We've seen prisoners hurt themselves before in order to wreck bonds. Now, every hero has a chance of being able to just flex their muscles and break bonds -- but not much of a chance unless a superhero. If I haven't made this ruling before, I would consider allowing a +1 bonus for every point of damage you inflicted on yourself in the process.

Now, how did Andy just happen to stumble across Barnes, inside the enemy hideout? Barnes should immediately be suspicious that Andy is also working with the bad guys.

Nope, Barnes still isn't suspicious! I think we're going to have to chalk this one up as a plot hole.

A supercharged pursuit plane sounds like a trophy item. I would say that it moves at normal speed (whatever that is for that type of plane) except when in pursuit mode (in a chase scene), and then it is always x amount of Movement rate faster. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.) 

  

Mystic Comics #2 - pt. 4

Back to Blue Blaze! A sudden cave-in forces Blue Blaze to break out his higher level Raise powers and we observe blue flashes radiating from his body, flavor text any player can choose, but then has to be consistent with.

There's an odd plot hole where Blue Blaze learns the man who just walked out of the room was the bomber, but instead of just walking through the door and capturing him, BB ignores the man and speeds off to the next mine the bomber had threatened.

Second plot hole: Even though Blue Blaze's speedster has unlimited speed, Barko (a terrible name for a villain, by the way) somehow gets ahead of him on the way to the mine. Does Barko have a speedster with even more unlimited speed?

Blue Blaze's Raise power might still be active from earlier, allowing him to catch a heavy boulder. If the boulder missed him then he didn't need to lift it, but if it hit, I'm hesitant to let the Raise power thwart it...and yet...I have to admit that the Raise powers are currently of limited utility except when you need to lift something heavy, and that's seldom going to be important during combat. This warrants more thought.

Next Barko shoots out one of BB's car's tires and makes him swerve, but a skill check helps BB regain control. So how does Barko follow that? He sics two dogs on BB. BB chokes the dogs to death. Not cool, BB! 

Barko has a pair of ice guns that put BB in a block of ice. Hold Person with flavor text? BB is only faking so he can get taken to Barko's hideout, which is sound strategy, or would be if he didn't let Barko leave, just so he can chase him to the next mine. If he really wanted to stop the mine attack, he could have just knocked Barko out sooner. At the mine, BB punches out two thugs working for Barko first before taking out Barko, following the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules about taking out underlings before you go after the main bad guy (just like in the H&H play-by-post game I'm running now!). 

The next story is Taxi Taylor and His Wonder Car. It's your typical story of a mechanic who invents a car that can do anything, tries to gift it to the U.S. government, he gets laughed at, out of spite, he keeps the car without even showing them what it does, he becomes a taxi driver with the car that can do anything, until he just happens to overhear spies in his backseat one day. So what is "anything"? It can intercept radio messages, like most radios can. It can transform into a plane, though it isn't the first car-plane in comics. It can also transform into a sub - also not the first car-sub in comics. It can fire "contra-magnetic electric rays" that can neutralize magnetic mines, and now we're finally in new mad science territory. 

The German spies are called Swastikans, by the way - perhaps the most obvious stand-in for the word Nazi ever in a comic book. 

Oh, the wonder car has 6" steel plates all around it, so acetylene torches can't cut through it. That's a difficult game mechanic to rationalize because armor normally only makes something harder to hit, not more resistant to energy attacks. Perhaps this is special steel plating that confers fire resistance.

Taylor isn't reluctant to cut air hoses and kill underwater Nazis. 

Back to mad science, the wonder car can emit gas bubbles underwater that cause enormous suction, enough to pull a ship underwater. That is also hard to rationalize with game mechanics. Maybe some kind of wrecking things? 

The wonder car has a collapsible ladder that can project out of the top of the car. There is a belt and rope attached to a winch that will automatically reel back in in two minutes. There is a trampoline-like net that pops out of a hatch in the top of the car, and I don't even know how Taylor activated that before falling towards the car. The car also has two revolving chemical water jets for putting out fires. Taylor even has a fireman's hat in his car, just in case he has to put out fires. 

There is a nice trap in the spies' HQ. When the wall safe is touched, electricity causes one's hand to be stuck to it. Raising the stakes of the trap is that the building is on fire and a temperature-sensitive bomb (controlled by a thermometer) is rigged to go off nearby. Taylor takes maybe 2-7 damage from being pulled away from the electrified safe, but is still only lightly injured. 

Next up is The Invisible Man Known As Dr. Gade. When I first read this story a few years ago I graded it with an A. Will it hold up as well this time?

In his origin story, Gade is working in front of an open furnace in his lab when an assassin comes up behind him and pushes him in. Now I'm interested in giving assassins a backstab ability so they can increase their damage from behind, but then transfer those points of damage into pushing. 

Soaked in chemicals he was pushed into, and then set on fire, the strange reactions transform him into a ...magic-user? Because what he demonstrates when he comes out is is Invisibility and Resist Fire. Well, not normal Invisibility, because Gade is still invisible after punching and grappling, so it must be Improved Invisibility. 

Gade is not a live and let live kind of guy. Just for trying to kill him, Gade knocks the thug/assassin from earlier out a 40th floor window. As the two guys who hired the assassin wait to shoot Gade once he becomes visible, he forces one of them to shoot the other by moving the man's hand. That's not something the game mechanics of H&H is really set up for, and I'd be inclined to say that the Editor rolled to hit Gade, but rolled so badly that he accepted the player's suggestion that the bullet hit an unintended target. 

Although Gade is angry for being initially given his powers, apparently they were only temporary and wouldn't have lasted, so Gade had, between scenes, invented a ray that bathes him with the same energy and renews his powers. For some reason that's not clear to me, he can't turn visible easily on his own, but he's wearing some kind of a belt or harness with a button on it and when he presses it, the device...maybe dampens the energy field that render Gade invisible? 

Zip Comics #3 - pt. 4

Just in case I've never made this clear, I don't just include stories I like on this blog. War Eagles makes me a little sleepy...but I include pages that interest me, illustrate how well my game Hideouts & Hoodlums emulates these comics, points out ways it could do so better, or just things I need to rant about after reading. 

This page is the second of those, and it illustrates that administering first aid only required intent and physical contact; you do not need a first aid kit (they do help, though!).

Hoo hum, the ol' "Guards, come quick!" trick worked again like a charm and...ooo, what's this? One of them doesn't make it out? Now, this woke me up and made me take notice. We so seldom see failure in the comic books, but of course it's quite easy to hit a fleeing opponent, particularly with a high rate of fire. And missing your hear noise roll? Sure, that can happen in game. 

Of course, Kermit is only supporting cast. Would they have turned around and gone back for a player character?

 

It looks like the boys are escaping in a Fokker, or maybe a Heinkel, but it has to be a two-seater and that canopy looks odd for either plane. The pursuit planes look like Stukkas, and it's amusing to think of a Fokker outrunning a Stukka - but hey, it's comic books, and random chance is king in Hideouts & Hoodlums as well. 

Oh, these crazy kids. The number of things that have to go right for this plan to work...no wandering encounters en route to the air field, landing unseen near the airdrome, finding a single guard out of sight of all other guards...

...the guard knowing where the prisoner is, the guard giving up that information, the guard's uniform fitting, getting a surprise turn for the bombing run, not getting shot by anti-aircraft guns on the way out, only one guard left guarding the prisoner...

Mind you, a lot of these are familiar tropes of the genre, but still...

"He ain't heavyyyyy, he's my brotherrrrr" -- Oops, wrong war!

What? Tom is still flying around bombing the fields? Where are those anti-aircraft guns? Why are four soldiers manning a machine gun instead?

Yeah, the kids easily win in the end, so no surprises there. This next feature is Captain Valor, and with a witty script by unknown-to-me scribe Abner Sundell (a name to watch for here!) and lush visuals by Mort Meskin, I'm feeling like we should just ignore the jaundiced look of the orientals and soak in the rest of the story...but at the same time, it occurs to me that there must be a lot of junks floating around in the sea and, if Tsin hadn't fired on them, Valor would never have known this was the right one...

This mobstertype is going in Mobster Manual part II: M-Z as a pseudo-giant, a bad guy who is bigger and tougher than a thug, described as a giant, but obviously isn't literally a giant by any literal measure. 

"Bullseye!" seems to suggest a critical hit, but it also could have just been maximum damage. 

"That spinach I ate" -- great Popeye reference!

Hmm...here I was just raving about Meskin, but...look at those awful, stubby arms in panel 3...

You'd think that Valor would be taking continuous hit point loss by hanging from his thumbs, but he seems to be feeling like he just woke up from a nap here. 

I've no objection to the half-pint escaping from being tied up; supporting cast get skill checks too. And last-minute rescues are one of the reasons to keep supporting cast around! 

Valor doesn't seem to be actively recruiting supporting cast here, so the Editor must be elaborating on a very positive encounter reaction roll here.

Heyy...where did that flare gun come from? Did they tie him up with the flare gun still on him?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Target Comics #3 - pt. 2

The first page of this story (which I didn't share last time) reveals that Bull's-Eye Bill is "of the Target Range - Arizona." Here we get a reference to Florence, which seems like our first big clue as to where in Arizona we are...though, on second thought, just mentioning the jail there doesn't necessarily mean we're near it. There's also the slight chance he means Florence, Colorado or Florence, Texas, but Florence, Arizona is definitely the largest and most important of the three Florences.

Oh look, the "good guy gets his hat shot off" trope!

The outlaws fail their morale saves. Losing half their numbers triggers a morale save, as does being threatened with guns by a fighter.

We're going to jump ahead to the next story, Lucky Byrd, Flying Cadet. The glossary of cadet slang could be useful for an aviation-themed campaign, but I think it's more remarkable that the author felt that camouflage was a term young readers would not be familiar with. Of course, everyone knows camouflage today, but could that be because we had to endure the disastrous fashion sense of the 1980s and the rise of camouflage pants?

Here, Byrd makes a skill check and is able to recognize the type of motor he's hearing. Granted, that's of limited usefulness, unless it also tells him what kind of plane he's hearing.

"Kerwhooomm" is a strange noise for a plane to make.

A nice twist with the cowboy is that he comes in all belligerent, like there's going to be a fight, but then turns out to be quite reasonable. This could be the result of good role-playing from Byrd's player, or a random encounter reaction roll.

I think I know what this "Randolph" is Byrd mentions -- Randolph Air Force Base in Universal City, Texas. Which, you know, has a nice generic comic book city sound to it, like Metropolis. Uvalde is a small city in Texas, so that works out too.  

This is a Harry Campbell story; Harry either lived out west or was very well-informed about life out west, as I've noticed before reading his Dean Denton stories.

 

I'm not sure if powerful magnets would be the most efficient method of opening a hangar door or not; I'm in the future, 81 years later, and my garage door still doesn't open that way. But I give Harry credit for always trying to ground his stories in science.

I'm normally perfectly comfortable with accents being spelled out, but it's bothering me a little this time because that accent seems like it would sound French to me. I'm curious why Harry thought the French would be sabotaging the American airplane industry...?

Lucky Byrd is right! First, the guard falls for the feigning sickness routine (save vs. plot to make that happen). Second, he wins that fight while still on the ground (granted, he appears to get a surprise attack followed by winning initiative on the first normal turn of combat). Third, shooting the door controls just happens to make it go down, when it could have just as easily not moved at all. As an Editor, if I didn't already have a random table for those controls, I'd try to come up with at least four results for shooting the controls (door goes down, controls explode, another door opens, nothing happens) and roll randomly on it.

That scientific explanation for the invisible plane is pretty sound; invisibility is explained much the same way in modern science fiction. Kudos, Harry!
 

And before we go we'll just peak in on the next T-Men story. Although called "Return of the Octopus," this is first time we've seen him and this is the first villain (of many) to be called Octopus (or some variation on that).

(Scans are courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Famous Funnies #68 - pt. 1

We haven't seen Roy Powers in a while! Here he's on a cruise to Africa (the previous page smartly talked about how much school he was going to miss because of this, but he has a tutor on the trip) where there's going to be some big game hunting (booo!). More interestingly, here's the beginning of some mystery on the ship. What do they want in Roy's room? When laying clues, remember to leave olfactory ones too.

Uashin? I think this is referring to Uasin Gishu County, and it is located on a plateau, in Kenya. Interestingly, "Jambo Bwana" is a Kenyan pop song that will come out 42 years later. 
  

Skyroads surprises me occasionally; there is some interesting chemistry between these two characters, and I laughed out loud at "I was born quite young." Also, salt horse is slang for salted beef. 

Sure, we could talk here about how "fagged out" means exhausted, or how "I feel as though I'd been spanked by a trip hammer" reads like innuendo, but what really grabs me on this page is -- how is that record player working? Is it hand-cranked? Battery powered? I know they had the former back then, but I'm not sure about the latter.

Also note the "Wing Tip" about how 1st-level aviators would need to certify their transport rating, in addition to carrying a transport license.

Senor and senorita? That's interesting because, while Spain in its prime was one of the first countries to have U-boats in their navies, by 1940 Spain's military was in tatters from its civil war and did not have many submarines left. This is a good time to remind ourselves, though, that these are all reprints from earlier comic strips, these ones specifically from 1937 (according to comics.org), and -- according to this Wikipedia page -- Spain still had eight U-boats at that time. 

This page is a reminder, if mystery bad guys have been shooting at you, to search the ground for spent cartridges. With a skill check, you can identify which kinds of guns were being used to shoot at you, which could help you plan for your next encounter with them.

It might be easy to overlook this word through all that heavy dialect, but a yawl is that boat; a yawl is a two-masted fore-and-aft-rigged sailboat with the mizzenmast stepped far aft so that the mizzen boom overhangs the stern.

Oaky Doaks has stumbled across a wizard who lived in a cave for 20 years perfecting this flying carpet (giving us some indication for how long we can expect magic item creation to take?). The flying carpet has an incredible weight allowance, probably carrying 1,750 lbs. as it is here. Being able to reach cumulonimbus clouds suggests a ceiling height over 2,000 feet, and possibly much higher than that. There's no sense of how fast it is from this page.

How would you tell if someone is faking delirium? Perhaps a skill check at first aid. Or a Wisdom check. Or both, so characters with high WIS have a good chance of seeing through the deception, but mysterymen can also cash in a stunt for an automatic success on that skill check.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)